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Monday, 25 June 2012

Baui means build, speil means play, platz means place.

For a few years I managed the transition of
the only self-build Adventure Playground in Bradford, the Big Swing, from the
statutory into the voluntary sector. Supporting the staff and managing the site
through a period of transition gave me a real insight into the value of
Adventure Playgrounds and the capability of children and young people.

In April this year I spent a week in
Hamburg and Berlin with a study tour for play professionals co-ordinated
by ip-dip.com and www.meynellgames.org. The tour
took us to scrapstores, public parks and playspaces, community provision,
waldkindergarten and green school playgrounds. We also visited a number of
Adventure Playgrounds in both cities.

We first heard about the Adventure
Playground movement in Hamburg and Berlin from Christe-Beate of the European
Play Association (EPA). She was one of the first women to work on an adventure
playground in Germany and a real advocate for play. What we hadn’t really
understood was how the playgrounds fitted into society in the two cities;

Bauispeilplatz is known locally as 'the
Baui'. Baui means build, speil means play, platz
means place. I do love a German compound noun!

Tony from the EPA playground invites us to
visit the Baui with him. It has been open for nearly 30 years, since
1984. The tall tenement style houses crowd around the playground but mostly
relationships with the local people are good, especially after the death of the
Baui cockerel!

Armin, one of the playworkers, talked to us
about the Adventure Playground and the things that children can do; jumping,
building huts, lighting fires, arts and crafts playing football and keeping
chickens. So far so familiar; but if you have never been to an adventure
playground this doesn’t really convey a feeling of the place. The very
first adventure playgrounds in Britain in the 1950’s were called "junk
playgrounds" or "waste material playground" and this gives more
of a sense of how a good adventure playground looks.

“The junk playground should be characterized by signs of
wear and tear. It should be a safety valve to children whose town existence
otherwise keeps them nice and well-ordered.

John Bertelsen (1959)

The Baui definitely lives up to this description, like a
refugee camp of the anarchies of childhood with heaps and piles, self expression and half finished
and half started projects. This was also the day that I managed to completely break my camera in a game of tig-off-ground. This can be a dangerous place. Armin
talks about the perception of how dangerous the playground looks;
"children are not stupid, they can see dangers and learn to handle them
and experience them and go to their limits. It is better they go to their
limits here rather than in the Reeperbahn (the red light district two streets
away) or with drugs" There are very few serious injuries. In 18 years
Armin has seen 3 or 4 serious injuries. But many small injuries occur.

Kai and Lukas are both young people who have
grown up in the playground. Kai has been here 15 years, I ask him; "does
it look the same?" "No! No way. It always changes." he describes
himself as a child of the playground, a native. On an average day 90 children
come to the Baui, mostly from close by, within 500 meters of the gates. The
philosophy is that the gate is always open. No age limits, tiny children up to
older teenagers. Parents come too, for advice, support and to socialise.

Most funding for the playground and the
projects come from the City of Hamburg through Youth Project, Preventative and
Social Deprivation funding streams. "Applications each year are the sword
of Damacles"! Although the Baui has been very lucky, or very
creative and has escaped the worst of the cuts, the Ministry of Social
Affairs is restructuring work with young people and there will be a move to
another department which will inevitably bring about a new agenda, based more
on individual interventions. The staff feels this is a contradiction to the
philosophy of 'open gates' and makes the Baui become part of the authority.
This may change how the baui is seen by the locality. On the day of our visit
talks are going on at the town hall that will influence their ability to offer
open access in the future. Charitable funding only makes up 5% of budget.
Charitable funding is not an established way of working in Hamburg.

Well ordered tool systems. I take note; hammers, numbered. With
a board showing who has each hammer. Tickets issued with tools.

Changes to the school day in Hamburg are
impacting on the playground. Children used to come after school at 1pm and eat
lunch with the staff in a big communal meal, but this ended now the school day
ends at 3pm . Some schools in St Pauli now send school groups here as part of
the school day. The children come with the teacher, the playground offers
activities but fundamentally what takes place is free play determined by the
children. "Lessons after the Baui are calmer, when the children go back to
school."

The change in the structure of the school
day was seen to be a challenge at first, but actually by working closely with
schools they are meeting and working with more children and families. They also
do 'play actions' in schools and take groups out canoeing, on camping and
hiking holidays to the countryside. The playground is relied on by many
families to help them with things like reading letters or helping with social
issues.

There are 20+ playgrounds across Hamburg,
all of which work in different ways. The playgrounds network together once a
month and this playground is also part of local networks. They use these
networks to support children who are finding it hard to access other
provision.

We have lunch at the Baui, this is still
such a traditional part of the Baui day, staff, children and visitors all sit
down together and eat. When children finished school at 1pm there would be lots
of children here but today there are a few young people and 3 or 4 children
under 12. Annie tries her German on one boy who is making faces at the green
bits of leek in his soup. "Es ist grün" :( Annie
asks him in German if he thinks it will make him big and strong to eat his
greens. A member of the staff asks again if he thinks so. "I don't
understand English" he replies, poking his leek with his spoon. "But,
she asked you in German!"...

As everyone arrives there are greeting and
hugs for staff and young people alike. There is a very relaxed family feeling.
Armin says that he has worked with generations of the same family,
Bettina, who was one of the founders in 1984 still works here and I imagine
there will soon be grandparents of children who come to the playground who were
children on the playground themselves.

The hen house

We had passed another adventure playground
when we had been walking around Hamburg, then, from the train we spotted another
that looked very interesting so we ranged through the Sternzschanze and St
Pauli districts, following(ish) the line the train had travelled. Annie's nose
for direction is impeccable and we found another local adventure playground
that is also protesting against the same cuts. It is closed now but we peer
through the fences and look at the posters and signs on the fence. The
realisation strikes us, we have seen playgrounds similar to these in the UK,
some of our group have worked in or on them, but they are not in every
neighbourhood like this. A map of all the playgrounds protesting the cuts shows
the scale, and these are old, established parts of the community.

The dots on the map; bottom left, show the members of the
bauiplatz association in Hamburg

When we move onto Berlin there are more
chances to visit Adventure playgrounds. Founded on 2nd April 1990, less than 6
months after the fall of the Berlin wall, Kolle37 was the first adventure
playground in former East Berlin. The impact of such provision in the political
climate of the time is hard to fathom. It must have been a phenomenal leap for
the staff involved, the organisation symbol has within it the anarchy sign and
this speaks to me of how radical it must have felt at that time to be creating
a project like this.

Martin, who was the originator of the
project, tells us that the things that most adventure playgrounds have in
Germany are hut building areas, a fire place, the use real tools and places to
keep animals. He describes the playground as a combination of 3 elements:

"- Dangerous supervised situation.

- You can build up and destroy.

- Social connections are needed, you cannot
build a hut alone."

The hut building area is at one end of the
playground. They take it all down every year and then hold a hut building
festival between March and June and rebuild. They have a well set up craft
workshop, with a Blacksmith's forge and power tools. There is a replica stone
age round house on the site which is used with schools for teaching lessons
about stone age technology and history. There is an area designed for
smaller children and when we look around there is a group of 2-3 year old
children attending Kindergarten sessions.

The kinder area

The main building on the playground was
finished in 1999 and is the heart of the company Netzwerk
Kultur/Speile . The main foyer is big enough for all the tables which are
used for lunchtimes with the children. There have not yet been the reforms to the school day like there is in Hamburg so children finish school at lunchtime, they also have space they can go and do
homework before going out into the playground. Kolle37 has a contract with the
families of about 20 children to provide daycare on the playground but most
children are free to come and go.

The majority of the funding comes from The
city of Berlin which provides for 3.5 full time equivalent staff which is used
for 6 part time posts. The daycare group, of 20 children, funds another 1 full
time equivalent post. The children who come to free play sessions are 6-16
years old. We ask about the reason behind the age limit; “They have to be over
6 because whilst the staff is responsible for everything they can't see
everything. Younger children might not be able to perceive the dangers like
loose planks or sticking out nails.”

We later come back to Kolle 37 to meet up with
one of the playworkers. The site has 7 entrances so it is easy for children to come
in and to leave but easy for adults too, we are asked to arrive just as
the children are leaving. It's really important to Kolle37 to be an adult free space,
so adults don't interfere with children's play processes, but also because of
concerns about paedophiles or inappropriate adult behaviour. All adults on the
site can be challenged as to why they are there.

"Parents corner." During the week parents are encouraged to spend time chatting with each other but away from the main part of the playground.

Marcus describes the way the playground works.
“Every kid is welcomed and they try to find out their interests and tell them
the rules such as don't climb on this particular roof. Some rules you can't put
in a positive way. They can climb on all the other roofs but this one is not so
safe.”

Every two weeks children and staff get
together to talk about what is good, what is annoying and what rules work.
Every person has one voice so the children can out-vote the pedagogues (the
staff). There is a red, yellow and green card system similar to the one we saw
in the playgrounds in Hamburg. Cards can be used as currency, yellow and red
are given out for bad behaviour, green for good, which you can swap for more
nails, more lunch, to make a phone call etc.

the rules

I am intrigued by this, we talked about
similar systems on the playground I managed, the pros of being able to
discourage behaviour that the staff found difficult to manage, the cons of unduly adulterising the children’s play process, the inconsistency of who got
cards for what from the different staff members, the fact that the children who
would buy in to such a scheme are not the ones who the staff needed to engage
the most etc etc, the arguments went back and forth and we decided not to bring
a scheme in. But here most of the playgrounds use this sort of scheme.
Apparently the children here voted to remove this rule but when they found they
couldn't use green cards to earn their lunch anymore it came back.

The rules stay in place for at least a
month. There is a mail box where they make suggestions based on things that
come up during their play but rules are only discussed during meetings.
Children can make petitions if they feel they are strongly attached to a
particular rule or can't make the meeting.

Sale of craft work made by children.
I did manage to get one of these back on the plane!

The
children come here by themselves after school, they have lunch and do homework
before doing any projects they have in mind. There are special projects too at
different times of year, like blacksmithing or the hut festival. I’m initially challenged by the idea of the
hut building festival. One of the elements that we noticed on the Big Swing
Adventure playground was the natural cycle of creation and destruction. The
building of dens and treehouses which would gradually be abandoned and the
materials ransacked for a better, more exciting project. This had a seasonal
element, winter tended to be a time of destruction with the most fervent growth
in spring.

The Hut Building festival at Kolle 37 means every hut was torn
down and rebuilt at the same time. Children work on one hut in the
plan but they can change groups and huts at any time, they build the small
model huts before hand they don't have to realise this plan exactly but it
helps them plan how to make a hut. Each hut has the same space; 2m x 2m and
they are limited to 4m in height. The kids have to dig a hole as deep as your
knee for the posts to go into. Then the post goes in with rocks and is packed
in well. Each hut gets 200 starting nails. It used to be 20 per person, but the
children voted to change that. When the hut is built they can spend a
night in it. Occasionally children hide hammers so they can come and build in
the evening. Occasionally they come in and destroy others houses but not so
often. All much more structured than the processes I am used to.

But when you explore the
hut building area you can see how many huts they have managed to pack into what
is in effect a tiny space, you sense the care and attention and skills these
huts have been created with. Some look barely begun and are being built by very
small children. Some are sophisticated and have complex security systems (I
manage to overcome the most complex system for the best view by leaning a
pallet against a wall and shimmying through a high window!)

"Six years ago there was a very
different social demographic. Kids needed something to do because they had
nothing else." This is still true to some extent and some children are at
Kolle37 all the times that it is open because they don't have a parent at home
or because they don't have a parent who cares about them. There are an
increasing number of children from more affluent families too, which was a
challenge for staff but they have had a growing realisation that all children
just need space to calm down and just because they have lots of lessons like
piano or ballet they still need time and space to be themselves.

“Here there is a levelling of the social
structure because you will get dirty and you can't wear designer clothes
everyday. You do need people to work together to make a hut.”